The
thought that news reports should be true dawned on journalists only recently.
Until well into the twentieth century, most American newspapers propagandized
on nearly every page. This sometimes meant strict adherence to a political
party line. Sometimes it meant reflecting the personal and often eccentric
views of a single owner. People selected their newspaper or newspapers in full
knowledge of what they would find there. In fact, most readers probably chose
papers for the slant.

During
the first decades of this century, the Progressive Era ideal of disinterested
judgment in the public interest took hold of important figures in journalism.
Later, university train­ing of journalists became more commonplace, as did the
idea that news was a profession rather than a trade. The number of newspapers
serving individual communities began to decline. Surviving papers passed out of
the control of the founders and their families and into the hands of the
professional managers of publicly held corporations. All this led to the sense
that jour­nalism should aspire to some higher standard of veracity. Pub­lishers
had always claimed to be printing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth, but suddenly journalists began taking this literally. It was an
important step, and a salutary one for the quality of public discussion. But to
this day many of its implications remain inadequately examined.

This
is not surprising, since most news people talk as if they think the examined
life is hardly worth living. They con­sider themselves skeptics, but this is
not so much a matter of philosophy as of style. Even among themselves, they
rarely dis­cuss the nature of the claims of truth they make in their work or
the basis of the disciplines they follow in furtherance of these claims. And
when they do think about the underpinning of their reports, they usually get no
further than debating a two-source rule for unattributed statements or repeating
the cate­chism of Chicago's legendary institute of street wisdom, the City News
Bureau: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out."

The
considerations that determine when journalists feel free to print a statement
as fact typically do not take the form of written rules. They vary from news
organization to news or­ganization, passing down the generations by the process
of ex­ample. And they are sometimes utterly self‑contradictory. The same
editor may reject one story for want of neutrality and an­other for
insufficient authority of judgment.

The
issues of fact journalists have to decide cover an enor­mous range. Often a
newspaper must act in the face of quiver­ing uncertainty, as when it announces
which candidate has won an election before the vote has been tallied. (A
mistake can leave a lasting mark, as the "Dewey Defeats Truman"
headline marked the Chicago Tribune for
decades. To this day the Trib­une has
an unwritten policy that it is better to be last than wrong.) A newspaper
sometimes must even decide when to call a man dead, for example in the chaotic
aftermath of an assassi­nation attempt or when a totalitarian society hides its
leader's demise. It has to attempt to state fact through the smoke and thunder
of war and recognize the error that often hides in what Clausewitz called the
"vividness of transient impressions."

At
the other end of the scale, a newspaper must decide when to believe the
representation of a letter writer that he has given his real name, or of a
person calling in from a community arts group that a concert will take place on
a given day at a given time, or of a police officer that a burglary took place
at a particu­lar address. Even these decisions can involve great uncertainty.
When I was about to take my turn at City News Bureau as a lad of eighteen, my
father (a City News veteran) gave me this bit of advice: "When a fire is
burning, you're going to be the only one who cares how the dead spelled their
names." (Or at least he said words to that effect, if my memory serves me
correctly.)

At
another level of complexity, journalists make judg­ments about when to report
the statements of authorities. We commonly rely blindly on scientists,
economists, engineers, and other experts, all the while purporting to be
ruthlessly skepti­cal. And the judgment journalists make concerning which gov­ernment
statements to pass on to the public as fact‑which to report as debatable
and which simply to disregard‑stands near the very center of the press's
social purpose in a self‑governing society.

WHAT IS NEWS?

What is the proper standard of truth for the news?
To answer that, one must first come to some clear understanding of what news
is. Even at its most presumptuous, the news does not claim to be timeless or
universal. It represents at most a provi­sional kind of truth, the best that
can be said quickly. Its ascrip­tion is modest, so modest that some of the most
restless and interesting journalists have had trouble making any claim of truth
at all.

In Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men, James Agee, then a writer for Fortune Magazine, savaged the whole idea of journal­istic truth:

Who,
what, where, when and why (or how) is the primal cliché and complacency of
journalism: but I do not wish to appear to speak favor­ably of journalism. I
have never yet seen a piece of journalism which conveyed more than the
slightest fraction of what any even moder­ately reflective and sensitive person
would mean and intend by those inachievable words, and that fraction itself I have never seen clean of one or another
degree of patent, to say nothing of essential falsehood . . . . [J]ournalism is
true in the sense that everything is true to the state of being and to what
conditioned and produced it [which is also, but less so perhaps, a limitation
of art and science]; but that it is about as far as its value goes . . . .
[J]ournalism is not to be blamed for thi;s no more than a cow is to be blamed
for not being a horse.

Even
accepting that news is not the kind of truth that would meet the rigors of
science or the clarity of revealed reli­gious insight, there is still too
little agreement on how to define it. Though journalists might agree the beast
is a cow, they will debate what breed and how much milk it can produce. Look at
one day's newspapers from a dozen cities and you will find, even correcting for
local factors, no consensus.

One
might be tempted to say that news is anything that news organizations report.
In fact, this definition has adherents among a few journalists whose
fascination with power leads them to overestimate their own. It also appeals to
certain outsiders, such as those who encourage the media to do more up­lifting
stories in the expectation that‑they‑might revise grim reality as
easily as they revise a sentence.

But
the definition of news does not have to be so empty in order to explain most
variations in coverage. Most respectable journalists on American newspapers
would, I think, roughly agree with this statement: News is a report of what a
news organization has recently learned about matters of some signifi­cance or
interest to the specific community that news organi­zation serves.

This
narrows the debate over the news value of any par­ticular item but does not
lead to unanimity. The New York Times may
consider a vote in Congress on free trade to be the most important story of the
day while the New York Daily News leads
with a deadly fire in the Bronx. This is because of each newspaper's
understanding of the community of readers it serves and, perhaps, because of
differing judgments about what is significant.

There
are some papers, to be sure, that do not seem to be concerned with the element
of significance at all. Such a paper would always go with a sex scandal over a
coup attempt in the Soviet Union. Most contemporary journalists would scoff at
this as pandering, but the honest ones have to say that they, too, take account
of the pull of basic (even base) human curiosity; the difference is whether any
consideration of larger interests comes into play.

What
is significant will always be a matter of debate, but in general the evaluation
should turn on the foreseeable con­sequences. Significance and interest provide
separate bases for calling an event or piece of information news, and either
may be sufficient. No matter how few people were interested in reading about
strategic arms limitation talks, the enormous importance of these negotiations
to the future of the planet made them extremely newsworthy. And no matter how
insig­nificant Michael Jordan's performance in minor‑league baseball may
have been to the history of the United States, the deep popular interest in it
justified extensive coverage.

THE FUNDAMENTAL BIASES

My
proposed definition of news includes several elements that are not wholly
subjective (though this does not mean they are unambiguous): timeliness,
interest for a given community, sig­nificance. These look beyond the
journalists' personal prefer­ences outward to phenomena in the world that can
be dis­cussed, if not measured.

The
elements of the definition also suggest some ways in which the journalist's
report of reality is likely to be fundamen­tally biased.

First,
journalism emphasizes the recent event or the re­cently discovered fact at the
expense of that which occurred be­fore or had already been known journalists
recognize this bias and talk about the need to put "background"
information into their pieces. But commonly the internal logic of reporting
puts "background" information very much in the background and
tolerates little more of it than is absolutely necessary to permit the reader
to make some sense of the new material. From time to time a newspaper may go
back and attempt to tell about an event or issue comprehensively, but this is
very special treat­ment. The bias of immediacy is the rule.

Second,
the journalist has a bias in favor of information that interests his audience.
This helps explain the favorite com­plaint about news‑that it accentuates
the negative. People's curiosity shows a tropism for misfortune. Disaster
always be­comes the talk of a community in a way that good fortune less
commonly does. Trouble touches some people's empathy at others' sense of doom.
Fear and anger operate strongly at greater distances than love, so bad news
travels farther. One might de­light to hear that the daughter of someone he knew
had just received a prestigious scholarship, but he would shudder at the brutal
murder of a stranger's child a continent away.

The
bias of interest also means that the audience's blind spots will tend to be
blind spots in the news. If people are gen­erally indifferent about a
particular subject‑say international trade talks such as GATT — the
journalist knows that it will be very difficult to make them pay attention to
it, regardless of how important it may be in their lives. Whole areas of
inquiry go years, decades without attention in the news until they be­come
involved in an event that captures people's imagination. The engineering of
bridges receives scant notice until a large span collapses. Human retrovirology
meant nothing to the gen­eral population until the scourge of AIDS. Even
disciplines that find themselves more commonly in the news — economics, law,
medicine — are lit up piecemeal, depending on the fascination of the day. The
Phillips curve in economics reaches public print when in defiance of it
inflation and unemployment both begin to run high. Even an obscure field of law
such as admiralty might get an examination in the news when something of suf­ficient
drama happens upon the high seas. We learn everything we never wanted to know
about the human colon when a presi­dent has part of his removed.

Walter
Lippmann described the press as a searchlight that restlessly prowls across the
expanses, never staying on any fea­ture for very long. Actually, human
curiosity is the searchlight. We journalists just go where it points.

Finally,
there is a bias toward what occurs close to the audience's community. Often
this manifests itself as a simple matter of geography. A National Lampoon parody of a home­town newspaper called the Dacron Republican‑Democrat some
years back had a page one headline that read: "Two Dacron Women Feared
Missing in Volcanic Disaster." The drop head read: "Japan
Destroyed."

Community
is not always defined by physical proximity. Communities of interest have
newspapers, too, and the list of publications includes more than the trade
press. Consider, for example, the Wall
Street Journal and the New York
Times. Both have specialized audiences and are edited to satisfy their
inter­ests. USA Today also appeals to
a distinct public‑the business traveler away from home‑and this
explains many of the edit­ing choices it makes, which would be foolish for a
metropolitan daily newspaper with an audience that has a much different set ofshared interests.

The
bias of community provides an answer to a snobbish question one often hears:
Why don't other newspapers pay as much attention to international affairs as
the New York Times does? The Times recognizes that for much of its
audience the world is the pertinent community of interest. A disproportion­ate
part of its readership engages directly in international busi­ness and public
policy. Since it is circulated nationally, the Times becomes a kind of local newspaper for this community (and can
be as provincial about matters outside its territory as any other paper; just
try to get guidance from the Times about
the best easy‑listening CDs or religious TV shows). There are not enough
people in most cities who are deeply engaged in in­ternational affairs to
command strong international coverage in their metropolitan dailies, though in
certain centers such as Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Chicago the audience
is large enough to support a substantial foreign‑news commitment by the
local papers, and in others such as Miami there is enough interest in one part
of the world to require the newspaper to make a large commitment of space and
attention to it.

The
element of significance in the definition of news does not necessarily
introduce a bias. Rather it might be said to be the heading under which to group
all other biases. These may arise out of the social circumstances of
journalists, the impera­tives of the economic market on their news
organizations, the culture from which a journalist comes, or the larger
intellectual currents of the times: interesting issues, but I do not mean to
pursue them here, as they do not distinguish observational bias among
journalists from the bias of any other observer.

Later
chapters will discuss in much greater depth the re­lationships between news and
the audience and between news and the interests of a self‑governing
community as well as the reasons journalists define news the way they do. For
the mo­ment, though, suffice it to note that the biases that arise out of the
definition of news sharply restrict whatever truth claim journalism makes,
narrowing its angle of vision and establish­ing the qualities of the lens.

What
is the standard of truth to which the news ought to aspire? A report that meets
the criteria of timeliness, interest to a community, and significance may be
more truthful or less so. It may reflect reality or show it on a skew. Once
again, jour­nalists tend to look at this practically rather than
philosophically. And they have suggested over the years several ways of
describing the disciplines to which they adhere in order to cor­rect against
bias and maintain a proper relationship with the truth.

Accuracy, AcCURAcy,
AcCURACY

When
nineteenth‑century New York publisher Joseph Pulitzer made
"Accuracy! Accuracy!! Accuracy!!" his motto, he meant the small things:
names, ages, and addresses. Like other press barons of his day, he committed
his share of sins against the larger truths. Nonetheless, his emphatic
insistence upon the smaller ones demonstrated a great deal of practical wisdom:
Get the little things wrong and readers will not trust you to get the big
things right.

And
so before going into more subtle issues, it is worth spending some time in a
realm of knowledge where there isn't much question about what truth means. Not
that everything is perfectly transparent even at this level. Writers sometimes
face ambiguity about how to express facts that are easily verifiable. Does one
call a married woman Ms. if she prefers it that way, or does the newspaper have
a general style on married names? Should the cause of a person's death be
described as AIDS or the opportunistic condition that was the more immediate
cause of his demise? When a building carries a vanity address — One First
National Plaza, One Magnificent Mile — should it be as­signed a number on the
street that passes by it? In most in­stances a convention of some kind
designates proper usage, and it is possible to verify the simplest facts
through sources virtu­ally anybody would agree are authoritative‑telephone
records, county files, Dun & Bradstreet.

Journalism's
unacknowledged shame is how often it fails to live up to Pulitzer's standard
even with respect to the most commonplace details. Nearly everyone who has ever
been close to a news event has had the experience of finding the report flawed
in the simple things. Susan Jones is an associate profes­sor, not an assistant
professor. John Smith is the chief operating officer and not chief executive
officer of Widget Company. It is Widget Company, not Widget Corporation;
Lincoln Street, not Lincoln Avenue. The burglar got in by the back window, not
through the basement door. It's Diane, not Dianne.

There
are as many reasons for these errors as there are occasions: sloppiness,
mishearing, misstatement, mischief. But the reader of the news does not care about
reasons any more than the driver of a new automobile cares why his door handle
came loose. Error is the journalist's responsibility, regardless of the cause.

The
rate of error is a long‑term problem of the first mag­nitude for news
organizations. Author Michael Crichton makes the comparison between the media's
failures and the quality problem American industry has had to face under the
stimulus of increased foreign competition. In the case of the American media,
Crichton argues, the reckoning will come not from abroad but as a result of new
technology that will vastly in­crease the reader's choices of what to read.
When anybody can have any information source he wants at the touch of a keypad,
the reader will notsettle for
shoddy goods:

More
and more, people understand that they pay for information. On­line databases
charge by the minute. As the link between payment and information becomes more
explicit, consumers will naturally want etter information. They'll demand it,
and they'll be willing to pay for it. There is going to be‑I would argue
there already is‑a market for extremely high‑quality information,
what quality experts would call "six‑sigma information." (The
trendsetter for benchmarking American quality was always Motorola, and until
1989 Motorola was talking about three‑sigma quality‑three bad parts
in a thousand. Six‑sigma quality is three bad parts per million.)
[Emphasis in original]

Among
journalists the resistance to this warning is as great as the resistance among
electronics company executives to the warning about the inadequate quality of
American TVs in the 19 6os or among automakers to the warning about Ameri­can
cars in the 1970s. Journalists have just as much trouble admitting error as
anybody else — including the public officials whose "coverups"
reporters delight in uncovering. Judging from the small number of corrections
published in most American newspapers, journalists may have even more
difficulty. Surely nobody thinks newspapers run so few corrections because they
all operate at the six‑sigma level. Most editors do not give an
accounting of all a paper's daily errors (or even of its factual errors,
disregarding the spelling and punctuation mistakes, garbled type, dropped
lines, transposed captions, and so on) be­cause doing so would be too
embarrassing.

Properly
understood, though, a lack of corrections ought to be much more embarrassing,
for it discloses a shocking lack of concern about the basic quality of the
goods. Aggressive cor­rection of factual errors, while initially provoking
amusement in the public and consternation in the staff, ultimately builds both
credibility and pride. It makes Pulitzer's point emphati­cally. It says: We do
not tolerate error here. And when we dis­cover it, we cannot rest without
repairing the record. It says: While we recognize that exigencies of time and
circumstance make perfection impossible in the immediate rush of the news, we
are committed to making sure that anything less than per­fection at the level
of the readily verifiable will not stand.

The
whole culture of journalism must change before sim­ple accuracy becomes once
again one of its signal virtues. In an informal survey of upper‑level
editors at newspapers in other cities taken by a staff committee at the Tribune most of the editors thought
little of trying to obtain a rigorous understand­ing of a paper's rate of
error:

Editors
at most of the larger papers contacted ... said such a system [of checking with
people close to news events after a story runs to see how accurate they perceived
it to be] opens the door to disaster, and they would never consider using it at
their paper.

Typical
was the remark of one editor who called the idea insane and said it would
invite lawsuits. That kind of defensiveness shows how far journalism has to go.

Newspapers
need to get back to the basics before changes in telecommunications force them
to a public accounting. Re­porters who do not meet the simple standard of
accuracy should not be taken seriously, however stunning their work may ap­pear
to be in other respects. Newspapers should overcome their reluctance to use
quantified performance measures and begin rigorously counting up their accuracy
score. Goals should be established. Incentives should be provided to reward
improve­ment. The quality techniques used in other industries should be applied
in the newsroom, beginning with the elegant ideas that obsession with quality
saves time and effort and that ex­cellence comes most reliably as people first
do the work, not through elaborate fail‑safe mechanisms. (This is because
one of the most facile and common excuses given for declining quality is that
financial pressure has eliminated redundancy in editing, which means fewer
chances to catch errors.) If we are clever enough, we can get our computers to help
us by standardiz­ing certain error‑prone material (prep sports box
scores, for ex­ample, or routine listings) so that once we get a name or
address or telephone number right, it stays right. We might also build in
spelling‑ and style‑checking routines tailored to identify the
errors our measurement system discloses are most common. journalists will find
no thrill in this project. It is as dull as mak­ing sure the doors on
automobiles open and shut properly. And just as vital to the continued success
of the enterprise.

When
the idea of accuracy has really taken hold of a news organization, we don't
hear it respond to a challenge with a "we stand by our story"
statement before it has even had a chance to examine the complaint thoroughly.
News organiza­tions rightly hold up this kind of behavior to criticism when
other enterprises engage in it‑petrochemical companies de­nying
responsibility for oil spills, auto manufacturers blaming drivers for safety
defects in their cars, government protecting its own. A quality‑driven
news organization examines each seri­ous complaint of error, open to the
possibility that it may have been wrong, and takes the time to be sure before
either correct­ing itself or reaffirming the truth of what it said. Of course,
even a quality‑driven newspaper will make errors, because eliminat­ing
all possibility of error would bog everything down. But when it errs, such a
newspaper quickly and without defensive­ness acknowledges its mistake and
corrects it.

The
commitment to an exacting standard of truth is essen­tial at the level where it
is easy to agree what the truth is, be­cause the disciplines at the next level
become far more difficult to apply.

OBJECTIVITY

Almost
nobody talks about objective reporting anymore. What philosophical analysis had
not already undermined, radical multiculturalism did. But for many years the
ideal of objec­tivity prevailed in the schools, and you still hear it from
people who haven't spent their lives thinking about the press but simply don't
like some of the things it does. So the concept of objectivity provides as good
a starting place as any for the in­quiry into the meaning and limitations of
the words journalists have used to describe the truth discipline.

The
idea of objectivity came naturally to a group of people seeking legitimacy in
an era of scientific discovery. In its purest usage, the term suggested that
journalism meant to be so ut­terly disinterested as to be transparent. The
report was to be virtually the thing itself, unrefracted by the mind of the re­porter.
This, of course, involved a hopelessly naive notion from the beginning. And
surely every reporter who has ever laid his fingers on the typewriter keys has
known it.,

No
one has ever achieved objective journalism, and no one ever could. The bias of
the observer always enters the picture, if not coloring the details at least
guiding the choice of them. I don't use bias here as a term of opprobrium. One
might have an optimistic bias or a bias toward virtue. It is the inevitable
consequence of the combination of one's experience and inbred nature. An
observer may be able to recognize his biases and attempt to correct for them,
but even when this difficult psy­chological effort occurs, the resulting
depiction is still sub­jective, doubly so. The process of correction requires a
self-­conscious mental intervention that is at odds with the concept of
objectivity.

Trying
to think objectively while recognizing the univer­sality of bias becomes a bit
like trying not to think of a purple cow. An example of how difficult it is to
free the mind in this way occurs whenever a news organization attempts to deal
with reports concerning its own people or interests. Say WGN­ Television, a
subsidiary of Tribune Company, which also owns the Chicago Tribune, becomes embroiled in a public contro­versy
concerning one of its programs. Ideally, the story should be handled just as
though it involved any other TV station. But quickly this equivalence becomes
complicated. WGN is not like any other station. It is, for example, a
superstation seen on cable television all over North America. It is a sibling
of a news­paper with a long and colorful tradition and a certain position in
the local and national communities. Its behavior reflects upon the family. And
this gives its acts more significance than they might have had if done by a
station owned by a faceless entity.

Bad
publicity concerning the station could adversely affect its ratings and
advertising revenues, which could hurt the price of Tribune Company stock, in
which every Chicago Tribune reporter
and editor has a stake through the company retirement plan. Moreover, the fact
that the newspaper has a financial in­terest in the performance of the TV
station is no secret. Most readers know this and will, presumably, be looking
for evidence that the conflict of interest has led the paper to deal too favor­ably
with the story. And so the editors will worry about the ef­fect their handling
of the story will have on the newspaper's credibility. Though the hierarchy of
Tribune Company has, through long experience, developed a thick skin in these
mat­ters, everyone involved in the news decision still knows that all people
have similar wiring when it comes to bad publicity: Whether they say so or not,
they do not like it. And so there is a certain nervousness in the situation,
coupled with a summon­ing up of courage, which may cause an overreaction
against the source of the anxiety and an exaggeration of the play of the story.
So it is impossible to handle the story disinterestedly, just as though it
involved some other station, let alone objectively, as though no mind got in
between the event and the depiction.

Despite
the difficulty, good journalists always discipline themselves to correct
against bias. And good newspapers try not to shade the facts, even when the
facts are detrimental to their interests. They try to play it straight. There
are many examples. New York Times labor
writer A. H. Raskin was assigned in 1962 to cover a strike against the paper.
His report, critical of some Times negotiators,
appeared in the paper immediately after the strike ended and publication
resumed; the paper's chief negoti­ator later resigned.9 The Tribune, in a matter close to the cir­cumstances
of the hypothetical situation I just posed, played a controversy between the TV
station and the Roman Catholic archdiocese on its front page. WGN‑TV
returned the favor by giving similarly prominent coverage to a later dispute
between the newspaper and Chicago's Roman Catholic archbishop.

I
need to make a distinction here between discipline and style. Objectivity as a
discipline defeats itself. But as a style of expression marked by affectless
recitation of fact, it can have considerable force. The book Friendly Fire 10 by C. D. B. Bryan
provides an excellent example. Originally a series of articles in The New Yorker, which once specialized
in reporting of this sort, Friendly Fire tells
the story of the attempts by two parents to determine how and why their son
died in Vietnam. The nar­rative describes in detail how the mother and father
became frustrated with the way the Army bureaucracy responded to their
inquiries. Without facts to moor it, the family's imagina­tion began to race.

The
first time through this book, a reader cannot help thinking the author shares
the family's ideas about conspiracies and elaborate official coverups. The
objective style helps build this expectation. Here is an example. In it Bryan
describes the boy's mother's feelings after receiving a form letter from the
commanding general of U.S. forces in Vietnam:"

Peg
was still disturbed that with the exception of Culpepper none of Michael's
friends had written. She was now certain that at least half the casualties in
Vietnam were due to mysterious circumstances, "accidents," because
maps were wrong, because someone high on drugs was shooting off his gun or
because men were being killed by their own artillery. That was why no
communication was permitted. What was it that Waverly mother said, the one
whose son was missing in the bumed‑out tank? "We've been told by the
Army that we can!t discuss this with anyone because it might 'aid and abet' the
enemy."

The
enemy, it had begun to appear, was anybody who opposed the war.

Bryan
effectively plays upon the reader's preconceptions of journalists' biases‑particularly
the biases that operated at the end of that distressing war. We assume the
author thinks, along with the family, that there was official misconduct,
because journalists usually do. Why else tell the story?

Bryan
acknowledges his own presence in the narrative by reporting his interactions
with the family. He becomes so inti­mate with his subjects that when he reports
their thoughts (a technique discussed in a later chapter) he does not seem to
over­reach. Coupled with his withholding of judgment, these ele­ments of his
style only heighten the sense that he must believe what he is being told, since
he does not try to set the family straight. But as the family's ideas about
what happened to their son become more and more extreme, a deep discomfort
comes over the reader, at least a reader who has enough acquaintance with the
reality of that war to see the flaws in what the family imagined. To such a
reader, both the characters and the author seem increasingly unmoored.

If
the story went no further, the plain‑style rendering of the
"objective" facts of the family's statements and behavior might
demonstrate another difficulty of objectivity as a stan­dard for journalism,
namely that it begs the question: Whose perception of reality is the journalist
attempting to be objective about? The objectivity of a mystic is different from
that of a scientist, unless perhaps he is a particle physicist. How can a
writer be "objective" about a reality he can only discern as it is
refracted through the consciousness of others, who may dis­agree among
themselves? But in the end C. D. B. Bryan resolves this tension by permitting
the reader to understand that all along his story has been about the family's
growing distance from reality. He does this, not by changing his voice, but by
let­ting the factual details pile up until the reader has a fair idea that the
young man died as the result of a tragic but not uncom­mon accident of war.

By
the close of the book it becomes clear that Bryan's "objective"
stance is a writerly technique, an effective one at that.It serves to tell this story most vividly.
It permits the reader to sympathize with the family without sharing the
family's view. It creates intellectual suspense as the reader wonders whether
these people (Bryan included) are ever going to get a purchase on the truth.
And it depicts memorably the corrosive emotional effects of public doubt and
official silence.

But
it is not "objective." The author does not in the end withhold his
view of the events he narrates. Because Bryan knows exactly the meaning he
wants to convey, he can make Friendly
Fire appear objective, though in fact it represents a marvelous act of
intellectual intervention.

As
she often does, Janet Malcolm put the point provoca­tively. "The ideal of
unmediated reporting," she wrote, also in The New Yorker, "is regularly achieved only in fiction, where
the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagi­nation."12
She may be simplistic in her understanding of fic­tion, in which irony and the
complex use of point of view (including unreliable narrators) sometimes make it
difficult to determine what the writer really thinks. But she certainly has a
point about objective journalism.

OBSERVER AND OBSERVED

Objectivity,
along with certain other concepts journalists have used to describe their truth
discipline, assumes an independence between the observer and the phenomenon
observed that simply does not exist. Whether at the level of skittering sub­atomic
particles or the clash of nations, the object may be trans­formed by the
attention paid to it.

Good
reporters know how to make themselves unobtru­sive so that life will go on
around them close to the way it would if they were not there. Some of the best
share the shuffling, stuttering, down‑at‑the‑heel genius of
the New York Times's late, legendary Homer Bigart, who had a great gift for
making his intelligence seem harmless. Bad reporters try to dominate the room.

One
of the most serious difficulties of contemporary re­porting grows directly out
of the effect of observation on the phenomena observed. The most common objects
of coverage —beginning with government and politicians‑have become ex­traordinarily
sophisticated about the imperatives that drive journalism. Consequently, events
are planned and public policy decisions are made merely to play well on TV and
in the press. In one sense this development simply represents democracy at work
in an era of immediacy. The need for consent of the gov­erned, after all,
should put a burden on public officials to try to determine how people will
respond to what government has done or is planning to do in their name and then
to change course, if necessary, to achieve support. The problem is not the
immediacy or the continuous seeking of consent. The problem is the means, which
have placed an unhealthy emphasis on appearances.

This
is not a new phenomenon. Daniel Boorstin caught the leading edge of it with his
1961 book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo‑Events
in America. But the intervening years have seen politicians take Boorstin's
complaint as an instruction manual; what he decried has become the very basis
of American political life.

The
White House is an extreme but useful example of what has happened to the
process of decision‑making as the day‑to‑day grooming of
public image has grown in importance. Michael Kelly has described in the New York Times the extent to which image
has become a political creed:

In
this new faith, it has come to be held that what sort of person a politician
actually is and what he actually does are not important. What is important is
the perceived image of what he is and what he does. Politics is not about
objective reality, but virtual reality... It exists for only the fleeting
historical moment, in a magical movie of sorts....

By
the time Bill Clinton was elected the 42d President of the United States the
culture of Washington (and therefore of governance, and politics) had become
dominated by people professionally involved in creating the public images of
elected officials. They hold various jobs — they are pollsters, news‑media
consultants, campaign strategists, advertising producers, political scientists,
reporters, columnists, commentators — but the making of the movie is their
shared concern. They are parts of a product‑based cultural whole, just
like the citizens of Beverly Hills. Some are actors, some are directors, some
are script­writers and some are critics, but they are all in the same line of
work and life. They go to the same parties, send their children to the same
schools, live in the same neighborhoods. They interview each other, argue with
each other, sleep with each other, marry each other, live and die by each
other's judgment. They joust and josh on television together explaining
Washington to conventions of doctors and lawyers and corporate executives.

Not
surprisingly, they tend to believe the same things at the same time. They
believe in polls. They believe in television; they be­lieve in talk; they
believe, most profoundly, in talk television. They believe in irony. They
believe that nothing a politician does in public can be taken at face value,
but that everything he does is a metaphor for something he is hiding. They
believe in the extraordinary! disas­trous! magnificent! scandalous! truth of
whatever it is they believe at the moment. Above all, they believe in the power
of what they have created, in the subjectivity of reality and the reality of
perceptions, in image.

Note
Kelly's assertion that Washington correspondents share the political spin
doctors' belief in the subjectivity of truth. Nothing could be more subversive
of the journalist's tra­ditional role, especially since this belief links up in
an ominous way with radically skeptical social and intellectual currents in our
culture (discussed in Chapter Four) which threaten the very idea of truth.

Kelly
is certainly right that the media and politicians are in the game together. In
the conventional understanding of journalism's truth discipline, the separation
of observer and ob­served must be maintained. Even if a reporter does not
pretend to be objective or neutral (and Kelly makes no such pretense in this
piece), he still can insist upon operating at a distance from the event. But in
the new order, the journalist may think of himself as being as much a part of
the event as the President. He just has a smaller part, and so he has to work
harder to be noticed.

The
paradox is similar to what happens to journalists deal­ing with stories that
involve their organizations and other di­rect elements of self‑interest.
Reflexivity reigns. It becomes im­possible to separate the dancer from the
dance. The political writer finds himself in the odd position of analyzing how
a par­ticular message or action will play with the public when what he says
affects how it plays. To complicate matters further, the central purpose of the
message or action in the first place may have been to influence what political
reporters say.

This
may seem an enviable position for a journalist to be in, since the reporter
cannot be all wrong: The very existence of the article he writes provides
evidence of the political suc­cess or failure it describes. But at the same
time, if he is at all thoughtful, he will recognize that whirl is king and he
is dealing only with spin. He will yearn for some truth referent beyond the
small, closed loop of which he is a part. (It is interesting that the
"spin" metaphor is so close to the language of particle physics in
which the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle arose.)

Dealing
with this reflexivity is not simply an abstract problem for decision makers in
news organizations. It has real and immediate bite. I recall the night the
story broke that a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court had admitted smoking ma­rijuana
some years before when he was teaching at a prestigious law school. I got into
a heated debate with colleagues, espe­cially those in the Tribune's Washington Bureau, over my deci­sion not to run the story
on page one. I reasoned that it was not terribly significant that a person this
man's age had smoked ma­rijuana in the past, that the experience was common
enough that it probably reflected no more about his character than hav­ing had
an occasional drink during Prohibition would.

The
counterargument was that the professor's admission was going to be political
dynamite. Opponents of the President were on a tear after defeating the
confirmation of Judge Robert Bork. They would be able to use this to make
things embarrassing, perhaps even to stop this nomination, too. I argued that
this might not be true if everyone treated the information as having little
genuine significance to the merits of the appointment. As it turned out, the Tribune was alone among major papers in
playing the story inside. And the nominee went on to his politi­cal doom. The
information was dynamite, of course. But should it have been? And would it have
been if the story had been gen­erally played for its real rather than its
symbolic importance?Since this episode
we have elected a vice president who admit­ted having smoked marijuana and a
president who deepened an image problem for himself, not by saying he had
smoked, but by saying that he had not inhaled.)

The
self‑imposed constraints journalists try to follow af­fect the general
methods of politics. For example, if journal­ists were to universally disdain
the use of unnamed sources, it might appreciably increase the power of the
presidency. (It would also dramatically decrease the amount and timeliness of
information available to the public, which may be a way of say­ing the same
thing.) This is because the use of unnamed sources permits anyone with inside
information to use it against the position of those in authority and take
minimal risk of punish­ment in doing so. The leak is an equalizer.

THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORITY

This
is one of authority's problems with journalism, but jour­nalism also has
problems with authority, even in a culture that offers remarkable leeway to
free expression. One vexing aspect is how to deal with authoritative untruths.

Journalism's
goal is to depict significant things learned about reality since the last
report. When a scientific journal publishes a paper warning of a frightening
new environmental health hazard, or the junior senator from Wisconsin says he
has in his hand the names of fifty‑seven members of the Commu­nist Party
who work in the federal government, what should a disciplined newspaper report?
The facile answer is that both are verbal events in the world and, as such, are
true. But this narrow conception of truth disregards whether the authoritative
asser­tion is accurate.

When
the man next door says something to a reporter over the back fence and the
reporter has serious reason to doubt it, he does not publish a word unless he
concludes on independent scrutiny that the neighbor's assertion has met the
general stan­dard of proof. But when someone makes a statement from the
position of the authority either of rank or of expertise, the situ­ation
becomes more difficult.

If
the reporter has evidence refuting or clearly casting doubt on such an
authoritative statement, the proper approach is to publish both assertion and
rebuttal. It may even be appropri­ate for the journalist to present a factual
judgment of his own. But often the contrary evidence does not emerge in time
for si­multaneous rebuttal. If the journalist still does not believe the
statement, should he print it anyway? Or should he cast doubt upon it even
without articulatable facts tending to refute it? Are there ever circumstances
in which the journalist should withhold a statement by an authoritative figure
simply because he disbelieves it?

For
analytical purposes let's put the issue in its starkest form: Should a
journalist ever decide not to report what the President has said because the
reporter strongly believes, but has no way to prove, that the President is dead
wrong? The same, of course, could be asked of statements by the Pope or a
member of the Senate or House of Representatives, the chair­man of General
Motors, and so on all the way down to a police­man at a homicide scene. Any general
approach to this question should deal with the difference between such cases.

At
a minimum, the truth discipline requires that if a jour­nalist publishes
anything that might mislead, he must take steps to correct the misimpression.
This basic rule helps parse out problems that will occur in an electronic,
interactive news­paper, in which news space is virtually unconstrained and
large amounts of textual material can be published (speeches, press releases,
statements, and so forth) that bear on the news. The journalist presiding over
such an environment has a responsi­bility to assure that the texts that he
publishes are what they purport to be (that the XYZ Corporation and not an
imposter posted the press release on fourth‑quarter earnings, for ex­ample).
But beyond that, the journalist also should generally provide readers a context
in which to understand these mate­rials and, if he has reason to disbelieve
what they say, the evidence supporting his disbelief. This is not to suggest
that the electronic newspaper should exclude original source texts (which are
valuable in giving readers a full picture and the means for making their own
judgments). It only suggests that journalists have a responsibility to shed
light on the ones that are dubious.

Getting
back to the initial question, if the President says insurgents in the tiny
country of Xenobia have systematically massacred hundreds of women and children
and the journalist suspects this is bloody‑shirt propaganda, he has a
duty to try to determine whether these massacres have taken place. But that
takes time. What should he do the first night?

It
seems clear to me that if the President made such a statement, a journalist
must report it, even in the face of his own serious doubts about its veracity.
He might write his report in such a way as to put the remarks in the context of
the Presi­dent's efforts to create the political conditions for military in­tervention
in Xenobia, but he probably should not (in the ab­sence of anything more than a
hunch) transform his doubts into a clear statement of skepticism about the
President's claim. (If a reasonable reader" would take the account as
indicating the journalist's disbelief, the journalist has gone too far.)

The
reason for permitting a journalist to violate the ordi­nary truth discipline
and publish something he thinks is false is that the significance of the
statement, accurate or inaccurate, far outweighs the risk that it will mislead
people. It is impos­sible to avoid this kind of balancing test. Onto one side
of the balance goes the significance of the utterance and the level of the
public's interest in knowing of it (whether or not it is true); onto the other
goes the likelihood that temporary belief by others in the statement will have
irreversible consequences, the severity of those consequences, and the degree
of doubt the journalist has concerning the truth of the statement.

In
some circumstances perhaps even a president's state­ments might be withheld on
the basis of no more than a hunch. But trying to imagine them forces one to
such fantastic ex­tremes that they do not represent any important qualification
of the general rule in favor of straightforward publication. If on the first
night of the Gulf War President Bush had stated that U.S. planes had destroyed
the Iraqi Air Force on the ground or decimated the Republican Guard in their
bunkers, I would have published it without hesitation, because all we had was a
gut feeling that this assertion could not be so. The hunch was good enough for
us to withhold rumors reported on TV, but it would not have justified
withholding the President's words.

Few
journalists would be tempted to withhold in these cir­cumstances. But the itch
of doubt is epidemic. Journalists today have persuaded themselves that they
have a duty to show their universal skepticism of authority. In the White House
press­room it operates as a kind of collective gag reflex. And it be­comes most
acute when the political environment turns mean and personal, as it too often
does these days. Thus we have to be very clear about the rare circumstances in
which subjective disbelief of authoritative statements may be permitted to in­trude
into news reports.

In
cases involving authority less exalted than the Presi­dent, the statement
itself is generally less newsworthy in its own right, so the threshold for
withholding publication is lower. For example, a passing remark by a police
officer at a murder scene that the husband of the dead woman must have killed
her can easily go unpublished. The level of doubt is high, the con­sequences of
publication severe to the person involved, and the significance of the
statement (even the public's curiosity about it) low.

One
unavoidable consequence of this analytic framework is that it permits reporters
to treat differently cases that are alike from the point of view of the
potential victims of the ut­terance. A false and disparaging statement by a
highly placed public official in a supercharged political contest might be pub­lished
while a similar statement in a more tranquil situation by someone of less
prominence would not be. Likewise, an official pronouncement‑like a grand
jury indictment or congressional report‑would be publishable even in the
face of doubts about its validity. But so long as the journalist accepts the
obligation to follow up on his doubts and correct misimpressions, the temporary
inequity of this approach is acceptable, given the alternatives.

THE ADVERSARIAL APPROACH

Moral
revulsion at publishing doubted information and the fear of being deceived by
skilled image specialists have led some journalists to adopt an adversarial
stance in their relationship with public officials and others they cover. The
adversarial model comes from the conflict resolution methods of Ameri­can law.
The journalist postures himself as a relentless cross­examiner, hostile to
every assertion by those he faces. He begins with the supposition that everyone
in authority is a liar. Both his questioning and, inevitably, his reports may
reflect this supposition. The adversarial journalist has no trouble figuring
out what to do about a presidential statement he doubts. He simply lets his
doubts show.

Though
the law protects the journalist who strikes such a posture, neither the nature
of the system of free expression nor the reasons underlying the Anglo‑American
adversarial system of law should be taken as intellectual support for using the
ad­versarial model in journalism. Both systems were designed to achieve some
degree of truth from a competition among people with no necessary commitment to
accuracy, but both recognize at least tacitly that there may be better ways of
arriving at the truth.

The
adversarial model in law puts a duty on the advocate to state the best possible
case for his client. He has no general obligation to reveal the weaknesses in
his position, to discover the falsehoods in his client's assertions or to put
his opponent's case (though he is theoretically bound by minimal require­ments
that he reveal certain things that may conflict with his client's interest). After
both advocates speak single‑mindedly on their clients' behalf in a highly
stylized debate constrained by elaborate rules of evidence, a third party
(judge or jury) de­cides what is the legal truth. Some rules of evidence
frustrate the objective of reaching truth in the interest of advancing other
objectives. For example, the rule against introduction of ille­gally seized
evidence withholds facts from juries in order to deter wrongdoing by the
police. The point of the adversarial process is in the first instance to
resolve conflicts by providing the means of reaching some approximation of
truth from par­ticipants who may dissemble or speak with less than perfect
candor.

The
free expression model embodied in the First Amend­ment to the U.S. Constitution
has a similar rationale. The sys­tem of free expression permits almost any
message to be sent, recognizing that some messages will gravely need
refutation. But it assumes that this is best entrusted to a large,
decentralized network of participants in the system. It does not impose a gen­eral,
legally enforceable duty of truth because it does not trust any authority
officially to establish the truth. It permits speak­ers to make false
statements even when they know them to be false, but it does not encourage
people to speak falsely. Nobody denies that the system would work more
efficiently as a gener­ator of truth if everyone felt an obligation to speak
candidly despite their right to do otherwise. (The classic form taken by
debates within the academic world, for example, assumes dis­agreement but
presupposes a shared morality of truth‑telling. It recognizes that when
everyone accepts this obligation the cause of knowledge is most efficiently
advanced.) If nothing else, with the range of disagreement narrowed, the
audience (as the ultimate finder of fact) can focus on the areas of genuine
conflict.

The
cause of knowledge is also better served by journalists who accept a duty to
tell the truth rather than to take an adver­sarial posture toward those in
authority. The adversarial model

encourages
less than candor, which is why it is so subversive of good journalism.
Furthermore, though journalists certainly participate in the marketplace of
ideas, their role is not an ad­vocate's. They review the debate and try to come
to some form of judgment. They act as surrogates who help the public dis­cover
and weigh the evidence. Their role should be more like the judge's than the
lawyer's, more like the scholar's than the partisan's.

NEUTRALITY

Since
objectivity and the adversarial model are inadequate de­scriptions of how
journalists should do their duty to the truth, one might use a general standard
of neutrality to describe the journalist's truth discipline. This accords with
journalists' de­scription of their duty to be "impartial" or to act
"without fear or favor." As a description of the proper attitude in
reporting a story, these oft‑used descriptions have utility. They
describe an aspiration, of course, an unattainable standard of perfection. Only
an amnesiac could approach anything in a state of pure neutrality. But, even
recognizing this, journalists can discipline themselves to correct against bias
and deal with each new situ­ation with an open mind.

What
about situations that are not entirely new? Or situ­ations in which a study of
history provides some guidance? Pre­conception, after all, can be another word
for experience or even wisdom. If editors had no preconceptions about the
nature of warfare, they might have accepted early reports from the Per­sian
Gulf about the level of destruction achieved by the allies' first air strikes.
If they had relied on these preconceptions a little more, they might have been
warier about the military's reports of how flawlessly "smart weapons"
performed.

Some
years before the Gulf War, not long after the bomb­ing of Muammar al‑Khadafy's
headquarters in Tripoli, a senior defense official visited the Tribune editorial board. I asked him
what he thought when he heard the Secretary of Defense say the night of the
attack that since the bombs were precision-­guided weapons he found it
inconceivable that, despite reports of damage to the French Embassy, any had
gone off track. The Pentagon official, a combat veteran, replied something like
this: "Each aircraft carried two young men in their twenties who flew half
a day in uncomfortable seats to reach the Libyan coast. At that point they ran
into heavy flak. it flew up at their aircraft from all directions, trying to
kill them. They dropped down to low altitude and flew at a high rate of speed
toward the target, then turned the plane upside down to make the final run. If
they dropped a bomb one second early or late it would land miles off target.
No, I did not think that missing was inconceivable."

His
was a preconception, a very knowledgeable one.

The
attitude of neutrality in reporting a story has to be tempered by experience,
always recognizing that experience in turn must be tempered by the new insights
provided through the gateway of an open mind. But that is just common sense. So
why not simply declare a general standard of neutrality? The difficulty comes
when neutrality is meant not only to describe a state of mind for reporting a
story but also the way the story should be told.

Journalists often hear complaints that a news
story showed bias because it openly stated the reporter's conclusions or be­cause
it had a clear point of view. This complaint assumes that neutral presentation
of information is always a journalistic vir­tue. Often the people who make
these arguments, sometimes with great intensity, have a strong point of view of
their own. In fact, hearing enough complaints of this sort tempts an editor to
treat them all as hopelessly partisan. What such people want is not the
journalist's neutrality but his agreement. Still, an hon­est evaluation of the
work that appears in newspapers today re­veals that most of it would not begin
to satisfy any meaningful standard of neutrality of expression.

Political
writers regularly evaluate the efficacy of state­ments by politicians and government
officials. Stories about the economy commonly put changes in the statistical
indicators into perspective (saying that a drop in unemployment does not mean
what it appears to mean, for example) even when econo­mists show no unanimity
on the point. Reports of foreign affairs include critical discussions of the
government's policy or lack of one. Local news articles contrast antiseptic
official statements with gritty recitations of the reality of the streets. Busi­ness
writers look at companies' activities in light of theories of management that
are by no means universally accepted. When great events occur‑whether
wars or disasters or triumphs such as the breaching of the Berlin Wall‑news
organizations try to write directly about the larger historical meanings and
even to imagine the probable consequences some years down the line, again in
circumstances in which there is no consensus among knowledgeable observers.
Either journalism is regularly disre­garding a basic discipline or else
neutrality of expression should not be the standard.

There
are many reasons to abandon the pretense: journal­ism needs to help people
understand increasingly complex is­sues that affect their political and social
decisions, and this is impossible to do without making judgments of fact and
value. People don't usually find perfectly neutral accounts interesting,
because bare recitation of fact can be tedious and leaves too much unresolved.
Busy people expect their newspapers to do much of the analytic work for them.
Neutral writing may ac­tually undermine the relationship between the newspaper
and its community by making it difficult for people to find a person­ality in
the paper, a unique voice to which they can relate.

The
judicial analogy is far from perfect, but it offers a use­ful place to begin.
Though we expect judges to be impartial and unbiased and to act without
preconception about the case be­fore them, we do not expect them to end in a
state of indecision about the truth and its implications or to leave readers of
their work in a state of confusion about what they have decided. The best
judges recognize the limits of their knowledge and their duty to act in the
face of factual uncertainty in accord with clear rules setting forth the burden
of proof and other tie‑deciders. They do make use of their experience‑both
as human beings and as lawyers‑to try to make judgments that have some
logi­cal coherence with other judgments they have made. But they do not let
partisanship or ideology (which could be thought of as an extreme case of
coherence) prevent them from seeing the exception that might challenge the
structure they helped to build. And when they write, they do not shy away from
making judgments about the weight of evidence and logic. We only ex­pect that
they give due account of the advocates' positions and then reflect their own
true reasoning so that it might be evalu­ated by others. They aim to be neutral
in their inquiry but not in the expression of their findings.

INTELLECTUAL HONESTY AND THE GOLDEN RULE

The
judicial analogy suggests a whole set of virtues — open-­mindedness,
impartiality, the duty to be candid about one's reasoning and about what one
knows and does not know, the responsibility to put as forcefully as possible
the positions of those with whom one disagrees. These virtues all come to­gether
in the concept of intellectual honesty, which links the truth discipline in
journalism with the highest standards in sci­entific and academic debate. It is
as good a statement of aspira­tion as any I can think of for journalists.

Intellectual
honesty means that in presenting a news re­port a journalist may draw certain
conclusions and make cer­tain predictions about the consequences of a
particular event, but it also imposes a duty to do justice to the areas of legitimate
debate. This is what separates news from polemical writing. The former must
attempt to represent a matter of public con­cern in its fullness. A polemic
aims to persuade the audience that one view of the matter is undoubtedly
correct.

The
Golden Rule has endured through the centuries as an ethical proposition of
enormous force because it offers a subjec­tive method for determining the moral
direction one's behavior should take. it asks that an individual treat others
the way he would like to be treated, to turn the tables, to empathize. This is
a useful way to look at the requirement of intellectual hon­esty. In reporting
a matter of legitimate debate (How big should the Pentagon budget be? Did
Alderman X take a bribe?), the journalist will surely reach some conclusions.
And, with some constraints described later, he should feel free to share his
con­clusions with his readers. But in doing so, the Golden Rule suggests that
the reporter must try to put the case against his con­clusions as forcefully as
he would want an opponent to put the reporter's own arguments.

This,
like many moral propositions, sets an extraordi­narily high aspiration. If you
deeply believe your own position, you will find it very difficult to express
the opposite point of view with the same enthusiasm and force. But the Golden
Rule is a corrective; it points the right direction. And, with dis­cipline, it
is not too much to expect reporters (freed of the impossible requirement of
objectivity and the nonfunctional requirement of neutral expression) to play
square with others' arguments, stating them honestly and presenting the facts
and logic supporting them. The Golden Rule is a perfectionist goal, toward
which to stumble in our imperfect, human way.

Even
the unalloyed gold standard does not require a jour­nalist to report every view
of a subject, only those that could be held by informed, reasonable people. Of
course, a journalist's bias may unduly restrict what he considers the range of
reason­able, informed opinion. And illegitimate claims may need to be reported
as important facts in their own right‑such as the racist, antisemitic,
and xenophobic views that mar the political landscape from time to time. A
reporter also needs to operate within the constraints of time, space, and reader
attention span that limit everything a newspaper does. But these must not
become excuses for lapsing into the one‑sided, polemical ap­proach in the
news columns. A journalist's reputation should turn in large part upon the
quality of his judgment in wisely sorting through these difficult issues so as
to produce work of genuine intellectual integrity.

Too
much of what appears in newspapers today fails to live up to the Golden Rule.
Once journalists recognized the philosophical impossibility of objectivity and
the rhetorical weakness of neutral expression, many of them threw off all tra­ditional
restraints against asserting opinion in news reports. Today many TV
correspondents' stand‑ups end with a little homily fit to conclude one of
Aesop's fables. You can find plenty of this in the newspapers, too, though
there the moral of the story usually comes at the beginning. In both media too
often arguments that would tend to undermine the journalist's judg­ments either
remain unreported or else are put forth as straw men that the reporter easily
knocks down. There are a hundred ways to do this. Common to all is the
adversarial unwillingness to permit the audience to make its own assessment of
the con­trary position without the journalist's heavy‑handed guidance.

FAIRNESS

Journalists
often use the concept of fairness to describe their discipline. Unfortunately,
the idea of fairness has a rich philo­sophical history. This gives it
implications that may be inimical to the truth discipline. Even as journalistic
cliché, the idea of fairness leads in odd directions.

"Journalism,"
one saying goes, "should comfort the af­flicted and afflict the
comfortable." Taken loosely as a call for journalists to concern
themselves with the suffering of the weakest members of society and to have the
courage to tell un­pleasant truths about the powerful, the statement makes
sense. But it also can be an invitation to bias, and journalists too often
accept the call. Should journalists always
afflict the comfort­able, even when the comfortable are doing no harm?
Should they afflict them simply because of
their comfort? And what about the afflicted? What if telling the truth to and
about them would cause them discomfort? Should the truth be shaded or withheld
in order to give them comfort instead? What if truth were the painful antidote
that in the long run would cure the affliction?

Any
deep consideration of the idea of fairness leads even­tually to questions of
distributive justice of the very sort raised by these tidings of comfort and affliction.
In its simplest terms, the issue is whether fairness means letting everyone
compete on the same terms, regardless of the advantages and disadvan­tages they
bring to the competition, or whether fairness re­quires that players carry a
handicap. Is it fair to say that a poor child from the urban projects and the
child of wealth and privi­lege should be judged by the same standard when
evaluating them for admission to college? What about when trying to un­derstand
the moral quality of their behavior?

John Rawls's Theory of Justice 16 provides an excellent contemporary example of
the idea of distributive justice. Rawls has the courage to face the whole range
of social advantages and disadvantages, as well as natural abilities and
disabilities (with which one may be born and for which one thus may be said to
have no personal responsibility)‑not only physical strength and
intellectual acumen, but also creativity, ambition and in­dolence, beauty and
ugliness. He boldly calls on people's sense of distributive fairness to
compensate for them, as if to repair God's injustice. This leads him a long way
from the idea of fair­ness as equality of opportunity.

What
might fairness in its Rawlsian, distributive sense mean in journalism? Some
participants in the public debate come better equipped for it than others.
Distributive fairness would have to involve some form of compensation by the
jour­nalist for this disparity. He might, for example, call all close fac­tual
issues for the weaker party or shade the way he put both sides' arguments in
order to give the weaker side a chance of persuading the audience. In more
extreme cases, he might have to withhold information helpful to the advantaged
side in order to keep the game even. All of these compensatory strategies sharply
conflict with a journalist's primary duty of simple can­dor, and this is why
fairness is a poor choice of words to describe a journalist's discipline.

The
ideal of intellectual honesty, tested by the Golden Rule, offers a much surer
guide. But this requires a degree of self‑restraint that is not natural
in people who become im­mersed in a subject and develop strong feelings about
it. The Golden Rule must be taught, and that has been difficult in jour­nalism
because of the lack of clarity and consensus about just what the proper
discipline should be.

One
problem has been the shift in weight between fact and value in news reports. No
journalist I know would favor lying to give the weaker party a more even chance
of prevailing in the debate. Far more likely would a journalist shade his
report of a valuative debate to favor an individual suffering under a disad­vantage.
Somebody, he might say, has to speak up for the flood victims, or the
physically handicapped, or the urban underclass, or the Vietnam veteran, or the
AIDS victim. And he might even overlook some strong counterarguments on the
assumption that the secure, well‑financed majority interests can look out
for their side of the argument very well by themselves, thank you very much.
This helps account, I think, for the populist streak in American journalism as
well as for journalists' repu­tation for being more liberal than their
audience. It also may be one reason journalists have seemed to many people to
be get­ting more liberal over time. As self‑restraint against expressing
opinion in news reports has fallen, the compensatory impulse becomes more
marked.

It
is not always easy to distinguish between fact and value, of course. In pure
narrative, value is expressed solely through the selection of fact. And it is
easy, once one starts handicapping the argument, to start calling more and more
disputes for the supposed underdog. Consider the balance of environmental re­porting
over the past few decades. Once journalists became per­suaded that powerful interests
were causing danger and using their strength to cover it up, the tilt set in.
It was not easy to learn from news reports about the evidence suggesting that
emissions from tall smokestacks do not cause widespread acid rain damage to
forests or that Agent Orange's dioxin does not cause severe health problems in
human beings or that the white spotted owl seems to be living happily in
unendangered num­bers in non‑old growth forests.

Better
than attempting to distinguish between fact and value and applying different
standards to each, the discipline of intellectual honesty applies the same rule
across all domains. And with the help of the Golden Rule it provides
appropriate guidance and restraint over the expression of opinion in news
stories without having to forbid the practice outright.

THE LIMIT OF OPINION

But
this is not the end of the requirements of journalism's basic disciplines.
Beyond intellectual honesty, journalists reporting the news need to restrain
the expression of their opinions, showing modesty in their judgments about
facts and always withholding ultimate judgment on matters of value. A political
riter should not include in his report on a presidential cam­paign his view
about whom people should vote for. Nor should he write his story in a way that
would lead a reasonable reader to infer his preference. A reporter covering a
trial should not reveal his conclusions about who is lying or whether the de­fendant
is guilty or innocent. In an article about the abortion controversy, the writer
should not come out for or against Roe v.
Wade.

This
departs from the judicial analogy and imposes a tighter constraint on
journalists. But the stricter approach is necessary in order to uphold the
traditional distinction between news reporting and editorializing. (Editorials
are polemical. They make their opinion about ultimate issues plain. And they
need not recite all contrary arguments, though taking them into account makes
for more persuasive editorials.) Preserving this distinction makes good sense for
a number of reasons. People have grown used to it. Withholding ultimate
judgment communicates the reporter's commitment to neutrality in his approach
to reporting a story even as he departs from strict neutrality of expression.
(it is hard to read the comments of an explicit supporter of a candidate and
avoid the thought that he will not give the candidate's opponent an even
break.) Modesty of opinion and holding back ultimate judgments of value pro­duce
a report that invites the audience to weigh information for itself and at the
same time offer the audience some help in getting through the ambiguities and
complexities. These disci­plines make it easier for journalists to put all
reasonable posi­tions forcefully. (It is one thing to give all arguments their
due when one does not choose between them explicitly. It is an­other to take an
ultimate position and then have to give every­one the benefit of the Golden
Rule.) Finally, withholding ulti­mate judgments makes pluralism in the
reporting staff easier to manage.

It
is hard enough under the discipline of modesty of opin­ion to permit writers
latitude and still produce a newspaper with a sense of coherence. This would be
virtually impossible if reporters were freed to express ultimate judgments. To
make all the judgments in the paper consistent, editors and publishers would
have to impose a political view, story by story, or else choose only those
reporters whose views were essentially con­sistent with the paper's editorial
positions. The result would be a coherent publication, on the model of the
European press, but not one that reflects a large, geographic community the way
American audiences have come to expect their newspapers to do.

To
illustrate the way intellectual honesty and withholding ultimate judgment work,
contrast Friendly Fire with another
book‑length report, America: What
Went Wrong? by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, originally published
in the Phila­delphia Inquirer.

In
Friendly Fire the writer had an
unmistakable point of view about the factual truth of the events he described
and about their deeper meaning. He presented his efforts to come to some
conclusion in a way that made his neutrality in approach­ing the story
apparent, even when he became involved in the action. And he scrupulously
permitted everyone in the story to have his say. There was never a sense that
he had left an incon­venient argument out or shaded it in order to make it
weaker. A compellingly readable piece of work, Friendly Fire went from magazine article to book to made‑for‑TV
movie, helping those who came into contact with it to understand what the Vietnam War had done to us.

America: What Went Wrong? also
created quite a stir. Readers of the Philadelphia
Inquirer responded with an inten­sity rare in the newspaper business when
it was published in 19 9 1 during the recession that ended the Bush presidency.
The articles and then the book touched something in the audience so powerfully
that some journalists began talking about it as a model for how the news could
be made relevant. It is not a model that fits with the disciplines for
reporting I have been describing.

Barlett
and Steele begin with this premise:

You might think of
what is happening in the economy‑and thereby to you and your family‑in terms of a professional hockey game, a
sport renowned for its physical violence. Imagine how the game would be played
if the old rules were repealed, if the referees were' removed.

That,
in essence, is what is happening to the American economy. Someone changed the
rules. And there is no referee. Which means there is no one looking after the
interests of the middle class.

They
are the forgotten Americans.

From
that point on the report marches steadily along, mar­shaling evidence and
emotional anecdotes to drive home the message that the Reagan‑Bush years
in America laid waste to ordinary, middle‑class America. The subjects
include health care, pensions, corporate raiding, bankruptcy, foreign competi­tion,
lobbying. In each area the approach is the same. Here is just one example.

Barlett
and Steele take the position that deregulation for the American taxpayer and
consumer has meant "fewer airlines and higher air fares, more unsafe
trucks on the highways, and more of your tax money diverted to pay for the
savings and loan debacle." 19 They assert that today there is less
competition in the airline industry than before regulation but never mention
that airlines now can compete on price and do so with a ven­geance. Nor do they
report that economists' predictions that deregulation would mean lower prices
and better service have proven correct in almost all industries where they have
been tested .20

Competition
did cause the shakeout in the airline indus­try that Barlett and Steele decry,
complaining that small towns once served by airlines have lost service because
of deregula­tion, but they do not report that under regulation the many con­sumers
traveling on the higher volume routes had to subsidize the few flying from
small towns. And on and on. Barlett and Steele give no quarter to arguments
against their position.

My
point is not that the Inquirer reporters'
work was un­worthy. America: What Went
Wrong? ispowerful polemical writing that
understands its audience and speaks in a populist voice to the audience's
deepest emotions. But it does not live up to the discipline of intellectual
honesty in that it does not give voice to contrary facts and arguments. Nor
does it withhold ultimate judgments. It begins and ends with them. To any mod­erately
skeptical reader this approach leaves the distinct im­pression that the
marshaling of evidence followed the convic­tion rather than the conviction
arising from the proof. The lesson of America:
What Went Wrong? isthis: As newspapers encourage more
analysis and conclusion‑drawing, even some of the best reporters at the
best newspapers can lose track of the line between news and polemics.

DEGREES OF PROOF

It
is not a simple matter to specify how much evidence a jour­nalist should have
before he publishes an assertion of fact. Cer­tainty is generally self‑deception.
Even the testimony of one's own senses can mislead, as anyone who has watched
instant replays in sports can verify. Most of the time, journalists do not have
firsthand knowledge of the facts they report. They must rely on others to tell
them, others with motives‑sometimes pathological ones‑for not
telling the truth.

Nearly
every journalist has at one time or another faced a consummate liar and taken
what he said to be true. Likewise, nearly every journalist has experienced the
education in skep­ticism that comes from being deceived by the government that
acts in his and his readers' names.

Still,
the basis of news reporting is a kind of trust. It begins with the trust
between a journalist and his sources of informa­tion and from there builds to
the trust he wants to establish with his audience. No rule of thumb can
describe the complex factors that go into a judgment of trust. But it is worth
singling out a few of them to establish a balancing test that can form a basis
for evaluating issues of journalistic proof.

Experience
is the most useful indicator; a source (either human or institutional) who has
been regularly right in the past generally deserves to be believed, unless
there are specific rea­sons not to. Experience with particular kinds of
situations also plays a role. If someone tells you that a man got injured by
fall­ing down to the ground, there is no particular reason on the face of it to
doubt the account. But if he tells you the man hurt him­self falling up to the
ceiling, it is probably worth doing some more checking.

There
is a fine line, of course, between experience and closed‑mindedness. The
unprecedented event is more likely to be news than the commonplace, and
conventional wisdom is often wrong. So a good journalist must not discount
everything that conflicts with what he has previously known. Nonethe­less,
experience can send up a warning, that little nervous feel­ing in the pit of
the stomach that says, "Watch out." Every care­ful journalist always
heeds that warning.

Verifiability
helps establish credibility. Reports that any­one might check against public
sources deserve more trust than accounts that nobody accessible to the
journalist other than the source could refute. Checking against public sources,
of course, always makes sense when there is reason to doubt. But it is not
always necessary For example, when a reputable economist re­cites the
unemployment rates for the last twelve months in the course of making an
argument about the prospects for a reces­sion, a time‑pressed reporter
ordinarily feels comfortable rely­ing on them.

The
advantage of using public record materials as authen­ticators of information is
that their wide and ready availability permits a record over time to be
corrected (which is another rea­son newspapers as an important part of this
public record need to be aggressive about correcting their errors).

In
the absence of public records, private documents should generally be given more
weight than oral accounts. Though documents can be forged, the embodiment of
information in this form creates more ways to discover a lie. As more and more
communication takes place electronically, sophistication in de­termining
authenticity needs to grow apace or else we will find ourselves in a state of
increased uncertainty as a result of the change. For example, it is possible
now to trick up moving video images to insert or remove people or objects in a
way the eye would never notice. Now more than before, documentary evi­dence is
highly persuasive but inconclusive.

When
a journalist finds no public record or documentary evidence to support an
assertion, he must decide whether he can rely on human sources alone. It is not
rare that he decides to do so. There is no rule that can tell him when to do it
and when not to. Credibility turns on a subtle blend of factors that includes
demeanor and even hunch, which is why law gives the decision of judges and
juries about witnesses' credibility such enormous weight on appeal.
Nonetheless, there are a few obvi­ous guides.

Journalists
often say they do not care about the motives of those who give them
information. By this they usually mean they are uninterested in considering
whose cause they promote by disseminating accurate, significant information.
But the statement is misleading, because journalists must take motive into
account in weighing what sources tell them. Motive gives a clue to the source's
biases and reasons for lying or telling the truth only selectively. The trouble
is, news sources always have motives, even when they are passing on true
information. Most leakers do not leak on themselves.

Corroboration
by other sources can be helpful. The Wash­ington Post "two-source"
practice during the Watergate inves­tigations reflects this. Dealing almost
entirely with anonymous sources on that story~ Post editors asked reporters to
confirm and reconfirm information through more than one source when none could
be put on the record. I don't know how such a prac­tice would protect against
being deceived by a group of willful people acting in concert, though in the
Post's extraordinary Watergate investigation it generally worked. Though
corrobo­ration is helpful, when all sources are anonymous, the level of
uncertainty in many instances is still too high.

Better
to require attribution to a source willing to be iden­tified by name. At least
others will be able to assess the credi­bility of the source, and if it later
turns out that he lied, he will have to face the consequences, which tends to
deter lying in the first place.

Other
reasons not to rely on anonymous sources will be discussed in a later chapter.
But restrictions by news organi­zations upon their use always raise the issue
of whether the Watergate scandal would have gone unrevealed under such rules.
Almost any self‑restraint on the part of journalists might make it
impossible in a particular instance to get or publish valuable information, but
the only way around that is to take the position (which one sometimes hears
when journalists get into swashbuckling postures in public forums) that any
means of getting and publishing a fact is justified. Short of that, it is
possible to recognize that certain kinds of stories require less restrictive
rules than others. This leads to a difficult balancing test in which
journalists must weigh the magnitude of the con­sequences of publishing along
with the level of confidence in the accuracy of the information and the effect
publication will have on particular individuals, especially those who may be
harmed.

When
a report would have the effect of disparaging an identified or identifiable
private individual unconnected with government or public affairs, the case is
strong for requiring a very high degree of proof and forbidding the use of
anonymous sources. The reporting of private activities, while important, is not
as central to the role of the press as the reporting of govern­ment. Private
individuals often have less protection against un­fair attack and less ability
to fight back. But when the report is about government and politics and does
not single out any in­dividual, anonymity is much more tolerable. (For example,
the articles that so often appear quoting "senior government offi­cials"
on cabinet secretaries' airplanes during overseas missions generally do more
good in letting the public in on the govern­ment line than harm in hiding the
identity of the speaker, usu­ally the cabinet secretary himself.)

Likewise,
when the potential harm from not publishing vastly exceeds the harm that might
occur if the information published turns out to be in error, there may be
reasons for ac­cepting the accounts of anonymous individuals or other sources
of information that would not pass muster in less grave cir­cumstances. Perhaps
this analysis would have justified the use of sources in the Watergate reports,
though that is still worth debating.

The
social gravity factored into this balancing test cannot be measured on a
scientific scale. Journalists will tend routinely to overestimate it and accept
inadequate evidence in the excite­ment and immediacy of the pursuit of a
fascinating story. So newspapers should establish a strict rule against
publication of disparaging information about individuals based solely on
anonymous sources. They may then permit rare exceptions to be made only by
decision at the highest level of the news orga­nization. This does not
guarantee wisdom; it only reduces the number of occasions for error, since the
cumbersome exception process dissuades reporters from trying and gives them an
in­centive to get proof that meets the higher standard. (In my experience
reporters usually come up with attributable proof when they cannot get the
story into the newspaper any other way. This always produces a better story,
because it allows the reader to evaluate the sources.) When newspapers do
permit at­tribution to anonymous sources, they should attempt to pro­vide the
reader as much information about the sources as they can. it helps to be told
that a piece of information came from a CIA official rather than from a
"knowledgeable source."

The
question of how and when one knows enough to pub­lish has infinite variations.
It produces some intriguing news­room debates. But it is time for journalists
to codify their stan­dards in explicit guidelines.